Opening: Leda Bourgogne - The Professors Body Kunstraum
Kunstraum, 18 Uhr
23. Oct
As bell hooks famously observed in her 1993 essay “Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”, the professor’s body is marked by both “repression and denial”. Caught up in the long-exhausted Cartesian split between body and mind, teaching in higher education appears to be a predominantly cerebral affair. In such an environment, the language for articulating and intervening in what the professorial body is, remains critically underdeveloped, particularly where it intersects with histories of race and gender.
The public program at Kunstraum will focus on the professorial body as a site of both disciplinary power and radical pedagogical emancipation. As hooks insists, there is a latent transgressiveness to higher university education that demands a critical analysis of both power and pleasure. Such an analysis must begin with the ongoing failure of many universities to address the countless examples of sexual harassment and violence experienced by women-identifying and non-binary/gender non-conforming students.[1] The continuing difficulty of hooks’ appeal, however, becomes clearer when considering the intense discussions in feminist theory and academia about student-teacher relations in cases such as Jane Gallop, author of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, or more recently Avital Ronell, the NYU professor accused of sexual harassment by a former queer student. Echoing Amia Srinivasan’s
recent call for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy”, The Professor’s Body seeks to identify the legal, social and institutional conditions necessary to differentiate discrimination from transgression.
